When Daddy Sings, The Whole World Cringes

Me, in the car, singing loudly:

I came in like a Taco Bell
I ate and I don't feel so well
The grease has gone into my gut
Things soon will come out of my butt

Beautiful Wife: "Did you hear that somewhere, or did you come up with those lyrics yourself."

Me: "I came up with them myself."

Beautiful Wife: "I'm so proud."

Movies

Okay, how can I watch Guardians of the Galaxy and the opening is fine, but I watch Spring and the dude losing his mom in the first three minutes utterly wrecks me?

I know I'm late to the party, but it's actually a really good movie - part romance, part horror, part science fiction. If you haven't seen it yet, see it. Whatever you think it is, it won't be what you expect.

Ash Knight Scene 4

It was just past dawn when someone knocked on his door. Edrin had been readying himself to sleep, but he'd half-expected some sort of interruption and hadn't settled in yet.

"Yes?" He opened the the door a crack, found the custodian looking in at him, and opened it the rest of the way.

"Two men tried to break into my rooms last night," the custodian said without preamble. "I need to know if you stopped them." He looked at Edrin, swallowed, then added: "I won't speak of it. But I need to know, for my own mind."

Edrin shrugged and stepped back. "Yes," he said. "You told me it doesn't happen here. If I have my say, it doesn't happen here."

"They belonged to the Plague Dogs," the custodian said, crossing to one of the bare wooden stools that had come with the room. He seated himself upon it, then turned to face Edrin again. His face was pale, and there were dark circles under his eyes. "They would have taken the rents, everything I need to keep this building in even this poor repair, and everything I owe to its proper owner."

Edrin spent a moment considering that. This was supposed to be a hiding place while he tormented the church in hope of reforming it, but that didn't mean he could ignore what went on here. "The Plague Dogs are a problem? Or will be, now?"

"If you are what I think you are," said the custodian carefully, "I don't want to know. Better they think the building is haunted -- and from the sound of them, they do. But that won't keep them from looking, or from seeking some sort of revenge."

Edrin nodded. "You sent those two back?"

The custodian nodded. "Naturally. Two men, injured in my building and calling for their friends? Of course I helped them."

"Tell me about the Plague Dogs," Edrin said quietly. "Tell me where to find them."

A Theory on Teams

I have a hypothesis. I'm not sure exactly when I started developing it (or when it went from a sneaking, subliminal suspicion to an actual hypothesis), but over the years I've come to believe more and more strongly that it's true.

It seems to me that any time you have a good, solid, working organization, there are one or two core people who are holding the whole thing together. As long those one or two people are involved, the team will hold together even if other members come and go (though there's also likely to be less turnover as long as that key person/those key people are in place).

Now, so far that doesn't sound like much of a revelation. In fact, it sounds like the opening line from any number of Business Leadership books and articles.

The thing is, the key people for any given team -- and this can be a company, a department, a church... almost anything, really, as long as it has some organization and some goals. The thing is, the key people for any given team aren't necessarily the ones in charge. They can be, but they don't have to be. They can be the ones who make the consistent good suggestions for how something should work, or the ones who help other people explain what they're trying to do so everyone understands it. They can be the ones who have a solid vision for what they're trying to do and how best to get there (which is usually, but not always, the formal leadership). Sometimes they're just the person who follows up and keeps track and makes sure everything gets done.

This is how you can change out a CEO without much changing the way a business works, but lose the head designer for the same company and have the whole business ready to collapse within a year. This is how you can have someone apparently innocuous retire (a good, solid employee, but nothing special) and end up having to hire two or three or four people to take over their duties. And this is how having one person leave can make an entire team completely dissolve.

It's not leadership, exactly; or at least, it isn't always what people think of as leadership, or identify as leadership. But in a lot of ways, it's actually more important.

Music: Darkness

Music by Theodor Bastard. Animation by Icepick Lodge.

I'm going to have to find more of their music. It's all over the place, but a lot of it seems to kind of... land in my sweet spot.

Music: Night of the Wolf

The band is Nox Arcana. The video is take from a Russian film called Vedma.

Ash Knight, Scene 3

Edrin had taken a room in one of the tenements in the Sink, where the Watch never patrolled and he would be hidden from the attention of the High Church. Only the poorest and most desperate lived here; only the Gardeners and a handful of actual priests ministered to them.

The Sink had grown up in the lowlands west of the docks and the warehouse district. Only the main streets were cobbled, and even those were in poor repair. The smaller streets and alleys were dirt, or more frequently mud, and in the spring the whole district would flood with runoff from the river. The pervasive scent of mildew was occasionally buried by the smell of smoke, rotting garbage, or human waste; the area was home to more rats, snakes, and feral cats than people.

Edrin slipped in through the narrow doorway, and made his way down the dirty hallway to the tiny wooden stairwell. When he'd first taken a room here, the custodian -- a big, burly man whose sharp eyes belied his rough looks, ragged clothing, and broken teeth -- had looked him over carefully and then said: "This is a lawful building, you understand? You fight, you steal, you cause trouble, you do that somewhere else. You don't bring the Watch here, you don't bother the other tenants, and you pay on time." Edrin had nodded and agreed; he had no intention of causing trouble here. These people had enough of their own.

So when he came around the corner and found the two men in front of the custodian's door, one of them kneeling as he wiggled a lifter between the frame and the edge of the door, the other standing over the mostly-hooded lantern and watching him work, Edrin's flare of outrage was immediate and overwhelming. He wasn't carrying a light; by reflex, he'd used the small blessing that allowed him to see in the dark, so the two men didn't see him immediately. So he kept walking, whispering another quick blessing to keep his steps silent on the creaky wooden floor. A third blessing, exhaled just at the threshold of audibility, snuffed out their lamp.

There was no other light in the hallway. The two would-be thieves never knew what hit them. By the time the custodian lifted the bar and opened the door, a length of axe handle clutched in one hand, Edrin was gone.